Ord Om ordet
Sign of Jonah
Luke 11.29-32: The only sign it will be given is the sign of Jonah.
What is the sign of Jonah? It refers to resurrection, of course. Jonah’s three days spent in the belly of the whale is a figure of Christ’s sojourn in death. Mortality was for Biblical Israel so much tied up with the sea that St John tells us: at the last, when death shall be no more, the sea will be turned into glass, rendered harmless.
Jesus gives the sign a further slant when he says: ‘Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites’. The Ninevites did not witness his emergence from watery depths. They only saw what came next. Jonah for them was a preacher of repentance, a messenger of God’s sternness and promise. The sign of Jonah reminds us that new life, in this world as in the next, is not given merely for our personal enjoyment but for the bringing-together and saving of God’s people.
No divine gift, no call, is private. All is grace. All is to be freely received, freely shared. We need to learn to live with empty hands. That is what Lent sets out to teach us afresh each year. In a Lenten prayer attributed to St Ephrem we pray,
O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk. Give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to your servant.
That is: take from me, at whatever cost, all that imprisons me in myself; give me what opens me up to communion, freedom, friendship, love.
Praying that prayer with sincerity, we may become bearers of Jonah’s sign, bringers of light into darkness, weary sea-dogs turned into peaceful apostles.
15th-century illumination now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.